The French Revolution of 1789-the Revolution of these latter days Importance of understanding it aright To obtain the instruction which is the true end of historical research, we must discern the ideas of which events are the phenomenal expression The public order which the Revolution destroyed, rested on the idea of divinely prescribed duty The Revolutionists attempted to rebuild it on the idea of political rights, attaching to man quà man PAGE 1 2 4 Their method social geometry 10 They applied this method to the speculations of Rousseau, and endeavoured to translate into institutions his Contrat Social 11 These speculations postulate that men are absolutely equivalent, and that the will of the majority is the 13 PAGE Substance of the Revolutionary dogma: that complete freedom, or rather lawlessness, is the natural condition of man; that all men are born and continue equal in rights; that civil society is an artificial state resting upon a contract between those sovereign units, whereby the native independence of each is sur- rendered, and an absolute power over each is vested in the body politic; that human nature is good, and that the evil in the world is the result of bad educa- tion and bad institutions; that man, uncorrupted by civilisation, is essentially reasonable; and that the will of the sovereign units, dwelling in any territory SUMMARY. A worthier conception of liberty will be set forth. Liberty is rooted in free will Free will, concentrated in itself, is moral liberty, and is, ix PAGE 18 18 But as soon as it manifests itself externally it becomes conditioned 19 And law, which is grounded in the self-same faculty of reason whence springs free agency, is the essential condition of its right use 19 Hence the necessity which compels men into the social state wherein liberty is realised 19 This truth was recognised by Aristotle and embodied in his Politics; he holds that man is a moral being and that only in a polity can justice be realised; that the state is an association of free persons, to be organised justly, and that its end is the higher life The statement of M. Fustel de Coulanges, that individual liberty was unknown in the ancient Hellenic republics, examined and dissented from . 21 23 Those republics were the first missionaries of freedom in the Western world 25 The political progress of Europe is the gradual vindication. of the personal, social, and public prerogatives which 26 The chief factors in this evolution were Roman jurisprudence, the Stoic philosophy, the Christian religion, and the traditions of the Teutonic tribes PAGE 27 Of these Christianity is the chief, for it vindicated liberty of conscience 28 The conception of freedom, as spiritual and ethical, the source of the great growth of individuality in the Middle Ages The constitutional history of England is the history of the development, by a process of organic growth, upon the one hand, of that individual freedom which means complexity, differentiation, inequality; and upon the other hand, of that closer unity resulting from the harmonious working of diverse forces, freely constituted, under the sway of great religious and ethical principles England retained the free institutions of the Middle Ages which, in most Continental countries, were sapped by Renaissance Absolutism and gradually disappeared 31 32 33 Since the great event of 1688, finally vindicated for us "the undoubted rights and liberties of the subject," English freedom has "broadened down," until we now enjoy the plenitude of all the liberties which the exercise of personality implies Liberty is rooted and grounded in inequality 34 35 |